Validation of level set contact angle method for multiphase flow in porous media

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Abstract

Pore-scale simulation has become increasingly important in recent years as a tool to understand multiphase flow behavior. Wettability affects aspects of flow such as capillary-pressure saturation curves, residual saturation of each phase, and relative permeability. Simulation of wettability at the pore-scale is still a non-trivial problem, and many different approaches exist to model it. In this work, we implement a variational level set formulation to impose different contact angles at the solid-fluid-fluid contact line for two-phase flow in simple rhomboidal pore geometries, and calculate the maximum mean curvature (equivalently capillary pressure) for each case. We compare our results with a detailed set of analytical and experimental results in a range of pore geometries of varying wettability from Mason and Morrow (1994), and demonstrate the accuracy of this method. While the simulations shown are for relatively simple geometries, the method has the ability to handle arbitrarily complex geometry (such as input from X-ray microtomography imaging).